Light Mini Filo Quiches are fun and easy! Made with eggs, leeks and Gruyere cheese and to make them extra crispy a shell of filo/phyllo pastry. Mini Filo Quiches is my take on the northern France dish called Flamiche. The traditional recipe is a kind of quiche filled with leeks, cream and a touch of cheese. You can prepare them in advance for a picnic, party or snack. On top of that, so polyvalent, you can have them for breakfast, lunch or dinner. They always fit right in, on the go or at the table served with a nice green salad and Riesling. These little bites are quite adaptable. The Flamiche usually uses a lot of cream, for this skinny version, I’ve done a velouté instead to lower the calorie intake. Also, I’ve used my favourite trick to bring down the calories; I’ve used phyllo lightly sprayed with olive oil instead of…
Cheese and Thyme Soufflé is a pure airy, fluffy bite into a cloud of cheese and a touch of thyme. You can use your favorite cheese, I wanted to try it with roquefort at first but then I finally went for the queen of cheeses: Gruyere! Everyone that knows me… knows I have a thing for cheese… borderline an illness. Anyways, let’s get back to the soufflé. Soufflés are quite easy to make… although it can infuriate some… like me yesterday. I had the perfect soufflés… coming out of the oven… then, just the few seconds to bring them to the shooting table, they’ve reduced a lot. Although still great texture inside, the soufflés needs to be eaten right away… Like the French say: “you don’t wait for people to sit at the table for a soufflé, you make them wait for it”. Because it need to be eaten right…
If you ask any French Canadian living abroad; what they miss the most from home, it’s certain that you’ll see “the poutine” in the top 3. This is an emotional meal for any French Canadian and it’s actually pretty much impossible to reproduce the traditional one outside of Quebec because of the lack of that fresh of the day “squeech squeech” cheese. We say “squeech squeech” because it does that sound when we bite in it, although if it’s more than 24 hours old, the sound goes away. The cheese is in fact a fresh cheddar curd cheese and it’s main quality is, that’s the “secret of poutine”, that it doesn’t melt. So you can pour that hot gravy sauce on top of it and it won’t melt. Poutine is the meal you get after a night out with friends, or in a food stand in summer time, it’s always nice to…